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Torte on Tuesday

With gateaus you always appear to be a world-class baker, they simply look so nice! And a normal cream gateau is easy to make! Today’s motto is Torte on Tuesday and here is my recipe for Black Forest Gateau or as we say in German: Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte 🙂

You start with dividing the egg white from the egg yolk. Now put the egg white with the lukewarm water into a mixing bowl and beat it until it is stiff. Test whether the cream is stiff by turning carefully the bowl on its head 😉 Now add the egg yolk and sugar and mix it briefly. Then you sieve the flour, cornflour, baking powder and cocoa into the bowl and fold it in. Now you fill the dough into an greased spring-clip tin and put it into the oven (ca 15-20 minutes, ca 180°C). The cake is ready when you can plunge in a knitting needle and there is no dough sticking to it!
The base now needs to cool.
Put the cherries with the liquid from the jar into a pot, add some kirsch and bring it to the boil. Pay attention that you spare some cherries for the decoration later (12-16). To thicken the cherries, mix flour and water in a cup and add it to the boiling cherries. Boil the cherries until it thickens. Let the cherries cool.
When the base has cooled down, cut it into horizontally into two parts. Put aside the upper part and put the cherries on the bottom part. Now wait until the cherries cool down. In the meantime you can beat the cream. Put it with 2 packages of vanilla sugar into a mixing bowl and whisk it.
Now you put about 1/3 of the cream onto the cherries and place the upper part of the base on it. Now you smear the whole gateau evenly with cream until no cherries or base can be seen. Now you need a piping bag. Fill it with the rest of the cream and decorate the gateau, for example like I did on the photo. Add the grated chocolate and the cherries!

The word gateau does not look very English, does it? And in fact it is derived from the French word “gâteau”, what means cake. There are a lot of words in the English language that originate in the French language. This is due to the “Norman conquest” in 1066, where the Anglo-Saxon ruling elite in England was replaced by the Normans (French) around William the Conqueror. French became the language of the elite and therefore many English words have a French origin nowadays. If you are interested in the Norman conquest look at the BBC homepage!

But what is the difference between a cake and a gateau? I talked about that difference with some people and some said that a cake consists of one dough only. But what is about cheesecake then? There you often have a base and then the cheese cream onto it. Someone else said a gateau is not baked, except for the base. That might be true. So let’s find out!

I really like this website where they try to answer exactly my question! Maybe you like to look at it! And in the end… a cake is a cake is a cake is a cake 😀